Gender through slaveryElijah Felicien
Colleen Green Humanities ½ 7 June 17 Gender Through Slavery The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, was a very interesting book through Queer Theory. Queer Theory tells us that your sex predetermines what job you would you have, or what kind of knowledge you would have, or how you would handle a situation, meaning that woman back then were thought to be weak, illogical and incapable of choosing for themselves. The character Cora in this book defies gender stereotypes, by handling a situation and listening to the male characters telling her what to do, and she is logical. One of the ways Cora doesn’t conform to gender roles, is because she showed physical strength and the will power. An example for this is when she undertakes the beating for Chester. While Chester is in the middle of his beating, “A feeling settled over Cora. She had not been under its spell in years, since she brought the hatchet down on Blake’s doghouse and sent the splinters into the air”. It is very unusual that a woman would try to break up a fight because that is seen by other people as a man's job. Even though Cora still got beaten pretty badly she stepped up to defend when other men did not. It shows us that Cora, a woman, had the strength to stand up for her friend when no others could, which demonstrates that gender does not determine your actions. Cora choosing her own destiny in this book is really interesting because even though she doesn’t know what to do or choose from a male's point of a view, without experience of running away. It’s still interesting that Cora starts to grow and still seems to not care about her male friends giving her a task to do so they have a better chance of escaping. Losing her friends along the way, I thought would take a devastating toll on her mentality and her personality. Well dealing with this sort of topic could be somewhat dramatic and that could affect your future decision making skills because of what happened last time. Once Cora killed that young boy she sealed her fate, and that was when the importance of her capture was increased. According to PowerPositivity, “Men tend to be a little oblivious with emotions that are not explicitly verbalized. Men tend to be more logical in their thinking and dismiss information that is not directly involved with the issue they are tackling. Women tend to be much more empathetic and susceptible to emotions influencing their thinking”. Could that be the reason why does’nt seem to have a lot of remorse at the beginning when something bad happens? When Martin and Ethel got caught having Cora lived and in their attic. Does she still not seem to have feelings over the people she left. What would the difference be if she was a man. Also, Cora being women wasn’t subject to the inhumane experiment where white people were injecting syphilis into male slaves. But that's besides the fact that Cora has a crazed man obsessed with finding her, after the failure of not finding his original target, Ajarry which is Cora's mother. Can you say it's because of her gender or because he wants to avenge his past self from not being able to capture her. Cora is still on the run trying to flee. But still throughout the book it's very hard to spot out the differences that clearly show between men and woman slaves like I said in the beginning about how female slaves are more like to do household work than outside. Although for some reasons mostly men show empathy and compassion to help out Cora. Like when Martin helped out Cora and let her hide in her attic until it was clear for her to go. But then again his wife saw the bigger picture because her belief of letting Cora go would in fact be more worse because people would have linked where or why Cora was even at that place to begin with.
|
|